Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
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Like the rebel in Brave New World, I am standing up for 'the right to be unhappy'

The Dalai Lama believes he has the right to make people happy (Photo: Reuters)

What does the Dalai Lama have in common with Joseph Stalin? A belief that he has the power and the right to make people happy. Yesterday a gaggle of happy-clappy academics, economists and politicians, backed by the Dalai Lama, launched a campaign called Action for Happiness, which will endeavour to make us Brits less gloomy and more perky by encouraging us to follow a cranky, sub-Oprah 10-point plan towards the Good Life. These happiness hawkers seem blissfully unaware of the fact that throughout history it has traditionally been the most authoritarian regimes, including Stalin’s, that promoted the politics of happiness.

Leaving aside the breathtaking banality and obviousness of the happiness gang’s 10-point plan (apparently you will be happier if you “focus on the happy moments of your life rather than the sad” and “have some purpose in your life”, etczzzz), what is most striking is the extent to which they reckon they know what’s best for us. They seriously believe that the entire populace, with our myriad problems and emotions and aspirations, can be led by the hand towards a one-size-fits-all definition of “happiness” as conjured up by them in their cut-off debates in some ivory tower. The message is clear: people are incapable of working out what is in their best interests, or even of managing their own emotions, and thus they need experts to colonise their minds and hearts and show them the way.

In the past, it was normally only tyrants who believed they had the power to “construct happiness”. They were keen on happiness promotion because they recognised that a placid, sedate, “officially happy” populace was less likely to protest, argue back or generally kick up a fuss about their lives and futures than an unhappy populace. So in the 1950s, Stalin plastered the Soviet Union with posters that said “Glory to the Great Stalin, the Constructor of Happiness!” Another, from 1949, said “Our Beloved Stalin is the People’s Happiness!” Stalin’s regime took pseudo-scientific measurements of so-called national well-being – not unlike today’s increasingly influential well-being lobby – in order to “prove” that the toiling, put-upon people of the Soviet Union were happy. Officially, at least.

In the 1930s, the Hitler Youth promoted “security, comradeship and happiness”. As Sebastian Haffner says in his book The Meaning of Hitler, Hitler saw it as his duty to “force the people into happiness”. There was a kind of “enforced happiness”, says Haffner, a term which might also be used to describe Action for Happiness’s belief that it can magically make us all happy by printing out and handing to us a Dalai Lama-approved guide to life. Kim Il-Sung, the founder of modern North Korea who died in 1994 (but who remains “Eternal President”), could probably have signed up to Action for Happiness – he also considered it his duty to “ensure the prosperity of the motherland and the happiness of the people”.

Political tyrants’ penchant for promoting happiness, for pre-empting dissent by constructing some BS notion of perfect social well-being, has not gone unnoticed by authors who have ridiculed or satirised tyranny. So in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, one of the big clashes between the authoritarian State Controllers and the antihero – known as “the Savage” – is over the issue of happiness. “I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin”, the Savage tells the State Controllers. “In fact, you’re claiming the right to be unhappy”, they respond. “All right then”, says the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy”.

And so am I today. Not because I think miserabilism is good, but because I don’t believe the powers-that-be have the right to invade our emotional lives or the ability to make us happy. Happiness is not a script that we conform to; it is something we discover through our own lives and interactions. What's more, unhappiness, an edgy feeling of dissatisfaction, a nagging belief that there could and should be more to life than this, is frequently the motor of change – both in people’s personal lives and in the social and political worlds. We should not let unhappiness be airbrushed from the social landscape, Stalin-style, by academics who patronisingly promise us that we will be happy if we just “go for a run” or “buy a cup of coffee for a stranger”.